The trailer for the remake of the classic film Death Race 2000 is out and I’m struggling to find anything good to say about it. Um… how about the cars – the cars look excellent. I’m really digging the post-apocalyptic, Last of the V8 Interceptors¹ with added fuck-off-big machine guns aesthetic going on there. It all looks a bit Carmageddon which is not necessarily a bad thing. More than that, there’s very little to praise about the film from what’s to see so far.

It’s true that it would be stretching it a little to say that the original (starring a young Sly Stallone and the ever-masterful David Carradine and produced by Roger Corman) was a masterpiece of cinematic storytelling because it’s a low budget exploitation film featuring dodgy acting, creaky script and even more creaky special effects. But all that aside, there was a soul to the story which, in retrospect, was quite anti-establishment and subversive (based on a short story by Ib Melchior). It’s set in the future in the fascist police state of the United Provinces of America and the Death Race is a state sanctioned sport that not only provides an opiate for the masses but also acts as a form of population control with points being awarded to the drivers for killing pedestrians. It’s also very blackly funny.

The hero of the remake is played by Jason Statham who plays a former NASCAR driver who has been framed for a murder he didn’t commit. You can just hear Voiceover man now can’t you. In the remake, rather than being a state-sponsored, bloodletting equivalent of F1, the Death Race takes place in an industrial racing arena and the drivers are all convicts. The instigator of the Death Race is a prison warden rather than the President of the United Provinces of America.

Can you see where I’m going with this? They’ve basically turned the premise of the film into Running Man with cars - Driving Man if you like (not that I have anything against Running Man - except for Arnie’s figure hugging lycra jumpsuit). It just all seems so, I don’t know, derivative. A missed opportunity. A total fucking waste of time and effort. Death Race 2000 was a satirical comment on government and politics but the remake is just looking like an action filled, sci-fi version of the Shawshank Redemption. With cars. And fuck-off-big machine guns.

Death Race 2000 was released in 1975 – the same year as the fantastic Rollerball (which to my mind was a fantastic cinema) starring James Caan and directed by Norman Jewison. It again focussed on the idea of a state-controlled sport as opiate and the theme was, again, one man vs The Powers That Be. It was a brutal and disturbing film and one of Caan’s best roles. It was remade a few years ago by John McTiernan (who never quite seemed to fulfil the promise of greatness evidenced in Predator and Die Hard which is a shame) but this time, the bad guys were the Russian Mafia rather than the state. In today’s media dominated society where sports stars are revered as gods-amongst-men by the obese, couch-dwelling population of the first-world nations, there seems to be no end of suitable bad guys that could represent many of the ills of modern living but rather than take a risk, they play safe by having the enemy be gangsters, thugs and villains.

It would be easy to point the finger of culpability at the directors and writers of these heartless and tedious remakes and say that they missed the point but I have a nagging suspicion that the problem lies further up the food chain. I think that it’s the Hollywood studios and suits who don’t want to rock the boat by releasing anything that might be perceived as subversive or anti-establishment or might force the masses to question The Powers That Be, ascribing as they no doubt do to the popular Bush administration maxim, “You’re either with us, or against us.”

I recently read a novel that was published in 1978 and very much reflects the Cold War fears of the time. It was adapted into a BBC serial shortly after it was released but I still read it with half a mind on whether it could be feasibly be adapted for the screen today. I think that it could but the ending would have to be changed significantly – mainly because the Cold War is no longer relevant and the Russians are our allies rather than the bogeyman under the bed. In considering how I might change the ending of the story, I started thinking about the current prevailing fears are and reasoned that it’s not primary school teachers strapping bombs to themselves that really scares us but the government sponsored erosion of our freedoms and the state dragging us down into an Orwellian vision of the future filled with detention without trial, state-sanctioned torture and never-ending wars against unidentifiable aggressors. That’s the reality that scares me and that’s the ending that would suit an updated version of this novel’s story.

The point I’m trying to make is that film is still a good medium to make social and political comment – even in genre pieces like Death Race and Rollerball. Say what you like about the mess that was Neil Marshall’s Doomsday but at the very least, it targeted those in power at the highest levels and for that it deserves more respect than these pointless remakes. Unless we’re careful, we’re going to see less films challenge The Powers That Be and more derivative pieces of crap lacking bite that toothlessly fellate the very people they should be targeting.

Rant over – feel free to share your own opinions and thoughts below.

¹ As in the car from “Mad Max” for those of you not as geeky as me.